CSOB EFB:
Are you sick of having tons of paper books of IAPs in your plane for the 4 or 5
states that you're going to fly over every time you take a trip?

Well here's something to consider:

Find a workable and low
cost used tablet PC on Ebay or your favorite Computer Retailer. A nice used
tablet like I found, the NEC Versa LitePad which weighs a whopping 2 lbs and is
barely 3/4" thick! Usually seen on eBay for under $400.

WARNING: Are
you thinking about a Garmin 696? Reports are the annual costs for software
and database updates on the new Garmin 696 are a whopping $1,425! That's
BEFORE an XM Wx subscription which would push this Garmin Cash Register to
something in the range of $1,700 to $2,000/year out of your pocket! Flying
100 hours/year and that's $20/hour, that's nearly the hourly cost of
operating your big bore Continental!!!!

Some people have
found the Motion LS800 to work well for them in the cockpit. Another option
might be the
Samsung Q1 Ultra (9" x 5" x 1") weighing 1.5 pounds, selling new for about $880 at Sam's
Club & specs HERE(used with a solid state hard drive by Beech Lister, Jeb, with success).

* Overheating problems have been reported by LS800 users in high ambient
temperature areas of the US.

Now go to the FAA NACO
link HERE and purchase that $14 DVD which has every IAP, SID and STAR in the
US. A year or 13 editions of this DVD is only $175! Load this DVD onto your
CSOB tablet PC and presto, you've got a very nice chart solution for those
once in a while surprises that can occur. It has an Internet Explorer access
interface as well as a very nice Tablet Style interface for IAP searches and
display selection.

The units with
conventional hard drives should not be booted up above 10,000' due to
potential head crash issues with these mechanical drives. If you can replace
the hard drive with a solid state drive, that would be ideal. These units
will not be stellar performers in direct sunlight, but I have found my NEC
unit adequate for my cockpit use. Your definition of "success" may vary.

My personal IFR practice is to
have full size pdf printouts from
www.fltplan.com of the IAPs that I expect
to need and a few others that might be alternates. Now I have my
Sony ReaderPlates to back
me up for that surprise stop or deviation when I would need a chart.

NEWS FLASH: Get
FREE PDF IAPs at NACOmatic, created by Doug Ranz! An organized PDF download of the NACO
approach plates, AFDs, SIDs and STARs
HERE. Please leave
a tip in his tip jar if you like his product.

To sum it up it costs half as much as a 696 for initial
cost.If you update everything on the Garmin it will cost you $1400 a year, the
FL190 is $298 which includes several things the 696 doesn't, such as approach
overlays, holding patterns, DME arcs and approach altitude segments. It also
displays sectionals, terminal charts and IFR enroute charts. as well as approach
plates. It also will show the aircraft superimposed on all except the approach
charts. It's half as thick and weighs half as much as the 696. It will also take
the winds aloft information from the XM and give you your time enroute and fuel
burn to destination in 3000 foot increments. On paper it kills the 696.

Here is my buddy's N35 mounting location for the Wx boxes of
these kinds of systems: